There are unsung intersections throughout North Omaha. These are places the past treated as important and meaningful, packed with businesses and enterprise, possibilities and the future. Unfortunately, almost every one of them met it’s demise when white flight kicked in and the community ran into hard times. This is the story of one of those unsung intersections that was a big deal for a short time.
The Early Years
Before the 1880s, Lake Street didn’t exist. North Omaha was the patch of the city between Dodge Street and Cuming, and it was packed. There were houses, apartments, stores, warehouses, churches, synagogues and more. However, in the area around the present-day intersection of 20th and Lake Streets, there were several country estates.
Salsbury was the name of an estate at the intersection of Sherman Avenue and Grace Streets, and was the largest in the area, along with another at North 17th and Spruce Streets. Salisbury became the site of Elizabeth Place, the grand mansion and estate built by wealthy Omaha lawyer and politician A. J. Poppleton in the 1880s. By then, North 17th already had a horse-drawn streetcar, too, and the area was braced for development. And develop, it would.
Lake Buys the Land
A judge named George B. Lake owned a section of land south of Locust and north of Izard. When lots started getting sold in Lake’s Addition, they cost between $500 and $850 dollars. That was around 1878. Within a decade, Omaha’s professional baseball team started playing at the intersection because of its easy access via trams and horse drawn streetcars.
By 1883, Lake Street had been laid out between the now-renamed Elm and Spruce Streets starting at Sherman Avenue, which is now called North 16th Street. The intersection was almost exactly a mile and a half from the main post office, and Omahans started moving into the area en masse.
By 1889, new businesses were sprouting up at 20th and Lake. Among the first was a pharmacy run by Mike Dillon. His store, which bragged would be a “first-class drug store equal to any in the city,” was on the northeast corner of the intersection. Johnson’s Barbershop was running on the corner then, too.
The earliest homes in the area were tiny houses by today’s standards, as lower-wage earners settled in from the nearby Union Pacific shops and other enterprises along Cuming Street and similar areas. Most of these workers walked to and from their jobs, and weren’t excited about long commutes. As the city grew, people were able to take the horse-drawn streetcars to get to where they were going, until after a while the electric streetcar moved in. Around this point, houses started becoming more significant and rowhouses were getting built in the Near North Side, as well. Suddenly, the community around 20th and Lake was full. City services started evolving. By the 1880s, early street paving campaigns lined Lake Street first with cedar blocks, and later with granite. Then the boom really happened.
A Neighborhood Blossoms
Faith communities were some of the earliest institutions in the Near North Side neighborhood. St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran was a Danish congregation organized in 1886 that built a church near 20th and Lake at North 21st and Burdette Streets in 1887. In 1907, they built a new church at North 20th and Burdette Streets, the church’s home for another four decades. Showing how folks moved into the neighborhood around 20th and Lake, the First German Presbyterian Church opened at North 18th and Cuming Streets in 1882. By 1910 they had built another church at 20th and Willis; it became known as Bethany Presbyterian Church and remained there for several decades.
In 1888, the City of Omaha Board of Education decided to build a new school in the neighborhood. There were enough new houses, businesses and other institutions in the area to warrant the building. Judge Lake either sold the land or donated it to the city’s schools. The city responded by building a massive new school.
A block away at Burdette Street and in the same year, the Ak-Sar-Ben Den was built at 20th and Lake Streets. The wooden building was 200 x 300 feet, and according to varying accounts, could seat approximately 8,000 people along with standing room for another 8,000 people. The Coliseum was a concert and convention center that also was used for bicycle races and walking and running contests.
Around that same time, formal and informal baseball teams took up residence on a sandlot on the intersection. Playing there for more than two decades, they rightfully thought the corner belonged to them. The Omaha Public Library also started bringing a mobile library to the intersection around the 1880s, and continued this for 50 years or more.
The the 1910s, the Lake School neighborhood in the Near North Side was built out. It was a cruel misfortune when the Easter Sunday Tornado of 1913 struck. Slathering the entire neighborhood with debris and doom, more than 100 people died within eight blocks of this intersection. Many of the buildings around the intersection were destroyed, too.
When the 1913 Easter Day Tornado happened, Edward McEachon Coal and Feed store was located at 1924 Lake Street. Down the street at 2002 Lake Street, Tom Johnson’s grocery store with meats and bakery was hit hard. However, the mainstays on the intersection were largely unscathed, and the neighborhood kept grew back. By 1916, Snyder’s Pharmacy was at full speed, and several other businesses flourished, too.
Ferrell’s Grocery was at the intersection by 1920, and in 1923, A.S. Morgan and O.W. Smith opened a meat market and grocery store on the corner. There has been a convenience store there for several decades, and now the Celebrity Barber Shop is there, too. The Marsh Pharmacy was operating there in 1930.
A Gilded Intersection?
Since the Great Depression, the Near North Side neighborhood around 20th and Lake has gone through many different incarnations. By the 1930s, the neighborhood has been completely in-filled. Grocery stores, clothing stores, professional offices, synagogues and churches crowded this hotbed of Lake Street. Every lot was filled with a house or business or school or otherwise, while every possibility was being explored for the area.
The Black community was strong around North 20th and Lake, as it was throughout North Omaha. The only Black Catholic parish in Nebraska was founded nearby, and today St. Benedict the Moor Church has served the community for almost a century. Christian Discipleship Church at 1823 Lake Street was active for a longtime, too, while there were several other African American institutions nearby. The positive image of Black culture at 24th and Lake spread east down Lake Street and infected that intersection with vitality as well.
During the 1930s and 1940s, the neighborhood just to the south of the intersection was a Jewish enclave called Little Russia. Starting in the early 1880s, Russian, Hungarian and Romanian Jewish immigrants started moved into the area between Kellom and Lake Schools. Escaping persecution at home, these Russians came to Omaha for many reasons, including its well-established Jewish community. Among them was a child named Tillie Olsen. After going to Lake School and leaving Omaha High School early, she was a worker and labor organizer in the 1930s in South Omaha’s meatpacking industry, organizing the United Packinghouse Workers of America in the area. Influenced by her parents’ Jewish socialist leanings and North Omaha, she was an activist all her life. Using her experiences, Olsen wrote highly influential novels and some nonfiction books. She’s regarded as one of the most important Jewish authors of the century.
The synagogue for Little Russia was the Beth Hamedresh Ados Yeshuren Congregation at 25th and Seward, which operated into the early 1960s. The Jewish Old Folks Home was nearby at 2504 Charles Street, and the ritual bathhouse was at 1512 North 25th Street. There were Jewish businesses up and down North 24th Street, and the area was very community-oriented.
White Flight Strikes
White flight came early to this section of North Omaha. Starting in the 1920s, the white people began moving out and away from the Near North Side, including the Swedes, Germans, English and others who’d initially settled there. After the lynching of Will Brown in 1919, the Near North Side was redlined by real estate agents, insurance brokers, banks and landowners who wanted to ensure white supremacy continued. After World War II, there were very few white families left in the Near North Side around 20th and Lake. However, an emerging Black middle class were buying fine homes and the Jewish community still had a strong foothold in the area.
When the riots struck in 1966, ’68 and ’69, the neighborhood around 20th and Lake was struck hard. The remaining commercial building on the southwest corner of the intersection was vandalized, and several buildings up Lake and on Florence Boulevard were hit.
By 1970, the intersection at North 20th and Lake Streets was radically different than it was just two decades earlier. With the demise of the Goodlett Building, the construction of the new Lake Elementary School, and the usage of Lake School as a special school for the Omaha school district, the neighborhood changed rapidly.
Along the way, the City of Omaha has been conducting “slum clearances” almost every decade, starting in the late 1930s when the demolished a number of affordable houses in the area where they built the Logan Fontenelle Housing Projects. After that, the bulldozers kept churning around 20th and Lake, plowing over fine homes and tiny houses all the same. Sometimes they’ve replaced them, like on the site southeast of 20th and Lake; oftentimes, they’ve left them empty. Its happening all over the neighborhood now.
Omaha Public Schools had made Lake School into a special education school, with every student identified as a special education student, and almost everyone African American. In 1984, the Seventh Day Adventists started operating the building as the Dorthea Fullwood School, and it was converted into the Fullwood Court Apartments in the 1990s. Today, the second Lake School stays that way.
According to the Omaha Public Schools’ “Making Invisible Histories Visible” project, when the Omaha Fire Department was formally desegregated in 1957, the only remaining black station was Engine Station 14 at 2032 Lake Street, just off the intersection. The black firefighters from there were moved to other fire stations throughout the city, and white firefighters moved into Station 14. The station’s second floor was removed in the 1970s, and today the building is the proud home of the Omaha Association of Black Professional Firefighters. They formed in 1974 to challenge discrimination within the fire department and to lead community outreach programs, and continue today.
Today, nonprofit organizations continue to meet many of the the neighborhood’s needs. The nearby St. Benedict’s School has been repurposed as a community center and the Hope Center for Kids provides essential learning opportunities activities for neighborhood children and youth.
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MY ARTICLES ABOUT THE HISTORY OF OMAHA’S NEAR NORTH SIDE
GROUPS: Black People | Jews and African Americans | Jews | Hungarians | Scandinavians | Chinese | Italians
EVENTS: Redlining | North Omaha Riots | Stone Soul Picnic | Native Omaha Days Festival
BUSINESSES: Club Harlem | Dreamland Ballroom | Omaha Star Office | 2621 North 16th Street | Calhoun Hotel | Warden Hotel | Willis Hotel | Broadview Hotel | Carter’s Cafe | Live Wire Cafe | Fair Deal Cafe | Metoyer’s BBQ | Skeet’s | Storz Brewery | 24th Street Dairy Queen | 1324 N. 24th St. | Ritz Theater | Alhambra Theater | 2410 Lake Street | Carver Savings and Loan Association | Blue Lion Center | 9 Center Variety Store | Bali-Hi Lounge
CHURCHES: St. John’s AME Church | Zion Baptist Church | Mt. Moriah Baptist Church | St. Philip Episcopal Church | St. Benedict Catholic Parish | Holy Family Catholic Church | Bethel AME Church | Cleaves Temple CME Church | North 24th Street Worship Center
HOMES: A History of | Logan Fontenelle Housing Projects | The Sherman | The Climmie | Ernie Chambers Court aka Strelow Apartments | Hillcrest Mansion | Governor Saunders Mansion | Memmen Apartments
SCHOOLS: Kellom | Lake | Long | Cass Street | Izard Street | Dodge Street
ORGANIZATIONS: Red Dot Athletic Club | Omaha Colored Baseball League | Omaha Rockets | YMCA | Midwest Athletic Club | Charles Street Bicycle Park | DePorres Club | NWCA | Elks Hall and Iroquois Lodge 92 | American Legion Post #30 | Bryant Resource Center | People’s Hospital | Bryant Center
NEIGHBORHOODS: Long School | Logan Fontenelle Projects | Kellom Heights | Conestoga | 24th and Lake | 20th and Lake | Charles Street Projects
INDIVIDUALS: Edwin Overall | Rev. Russel Taylor | Rev. Anna R. Woodbey | Rev. Dr. John Albert Williams | Rev. John Adams, Sr. | Dr. William W. Peebles | Dr. Craig Morris | Dr. John A. Singleton, DDS | Dr. Aaron M. McMillan | Mildred Brown | Dr. Marguerita Washington | Eugene Skinner | Dr. Matthew O. Ricketts | Helen Mahammitt | Cathy Hughes | Florentine Pinkston | Amos P. Scruggs | Nathaniel Hunter | Bertha Calloway
OTHER: 26th and Lake Streetcar Shop | Webster Telephone Exchange Building | Kellom Pool | Circus Grounds | Ak-Sar-Ben Den
MY ARTICLES ABOUT THE HISTORY OF STREETS IN NORTH OMAHA
STREETS: 16th Street | 24th Street | Cuming Street | Military Avenue | Saddle Creek Road | Florence Main Street
BOULEVARDS: Florence Boulevard | Fontenelle Boulevard
INTERSECTIONS: 42nd and Redman | 40th and Ames | 40th and Hamilton | 30th and Ames | 24th and Fort | 30th and Fort | 24th and Ames | 24th and Lake | 16th and Locust | 20th and Lake | 45th and Military | 24th and Pratt
STREETCARS: Streetcars | Streetcars in Benson | 26th and Lake Streetcar Barn | 19th and Nicholas Streetcar Barn | Omaha Horse Railway
BRIDGES: Locust Street Viaduct | Nicholas Street Viaduct | Mormon Bridge | Ames Avenue Bridge | Miller Park Bridges
OTHER: North Freeway | Sorenson Parkway | J.J. Pershing Drive | River Drive
BONUS PICS!
These are the Fullwood Court Apartments at N. 20th and Willis Streets. Originally built as the 2nd Lake School, it was a special education school for a short time period.
NorthOmahaHistory.com 
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